Manga Review: Return to Labyrinth

So I know that only three volumes of this manga have been released thus far (as of when I read it), so this isn't technically a completed manga review, but given my love for Labyrinth I felt the needed to give this a proper looking at. First thing that I want to get off my chest is this is NOT a manga. With a few small exceptions, Americans do comics, not manga. It just irks me that they need to call this American comic a manga to get it to sell. Anyway, moving on.

I enjoy sequels to my favorite things as long as they are treated like sequels. This seems to me that the writer obviously loved the story of labyrinth and wanted to write a continuation. He seemed to have a few interesting ideas however seemed to get stuck quite often and reverted to reminding the reader of how much it was still trying to connect to the original movie. Which would have been fine of that connection was based on researching the original story, locations and character backgrounds instead of relying on quotes and irrelevant cameos.

This book was written by Jake T. Forbes, illustrated by Chris Lie, with the first three volume covers done by Kouyu Shurei. I felt compelled to pick this book up at some point as I love Labyrinth and this cover art actually does David Bowie a bit of justice ( in my sick Jareth loving little fan girl heart anyway). Now, I was highly disappointed to find that the cover art is just that. The art within the rest of the book looks nothing like this. I'm not sure how you get from

This to this

What is sad is this is one of the nicest shots of Jareth in the whole story and he's probably the best drawn character in the book. The rest of them look like they were done with the help of one of those scholastic "How to Draw Manga" books, you know the kind drawn by people who have never in their lives seen a manga. Had the art been done by the same person who did the cover, I wouldn't have felt so compelled to stab out my eyes. Thankfully they grew back in time for me to write this review.  They also went on to ruin one of the best characters from the movie! What did they do to the worm?!

(credits for this image go to ToughPigs.com)

I have to agree with everything I have seen about this. The worm turned into a soul eating zombie! Seriously. One of the nicest goblin/muppet characters gets turned into this. I understand that he may have gotten a little older, but this is ridiculous. Anyway, getting beyond my hate for sub-par "manga" art, lets move on.

CHARACTERS:

Toby(Sarah's baby brother) - Toby is a rather unlikeable character. He has very little personality, is incredibly selfish, and has very little in the way of redemption. If you were like me you didn't like him in the movie either, but then again I have very little patience for babies, especially in movies. That being said whiny baby Toby is approximately 100 trillion times better than angsty teen Toby.

Sarah - She has turned into the adult every kid is scared they will grow up to be. She has forgotten anything and everything fun and become rather bland and uninspiring. I realize this is part of the story, but it still doesn't help me to like her or feel bad for her. Additionally her character desgn has degraded in to your basic sidekick quality nerd girl. A far cry from the Sarah every girl in the 80's aspired to be.

Jareth - Poor poor Jareth is a pathetic excuse for the witty and sly goblin king he once was. The author tries to portray him as just as cunning as he was before, but failed to capture the feeling of what made him Jareth. Now he's just a generic "sexy" bad guy type character with all the personality of a bowl of pudding who's become he's a whining, sniveling little emo boy because Sarah didn't want to stay in his incredibly awesome castle.

Mizumi -  She is one of the more interesting characters. I thought her addition into the story was one of the few things that actually make this feel like a sequel and not just a poorly written rehash of the first story.

Hana - The usual sidekick. Not much to say about her. She is not exactly likable but not hate-able either. She is just kind of there.In spite of having a stock character personality, she's at least sort of a new creation.

There are others, but these are your main annoyances characters.

As the storyline goes, it was a relatively unique concept that could have been very interesting. Toby  has grown up and has been sucked into the same Labyrinth his sister went through many years before. Jareth tricks Toby into tthe labyrinth because he wants him to become his successor as Goblin King. Toby has only mild weak whiny objections before agreeing. He then prepares to become the gobline King by spending a good deal of time within the Goblin City learning of it's history and the way of Goblin culture. Which honestly could have been made really interesting as there's a wealth of Goblin society underpinnings that were never discussed in the original movie. The author could have really ran with things here, but instead choose to stick with the bland mediocrity that characterizes the "manga". 

I honestly wish this could have been if not a good book a least enjoyable one if more time was on the present  than constantly and needlessly rehashing what  happened 18 years ago. Surely in a society that's exisited for at least the last 1300 years, there'd be at least a few other things to discuss. Instead we get random quotes from the first movie that have no real bearing on anything, and what amount to walk on cameos of characters that were annoying and unimportant the first time. That almost completely lack of any original contents just reminds you that this is just some fan-boys' poorly thought out fan fiction.

Overall this is a poor excuse for $10 a book. The art inside is pathetic, the storyline might be interesting but relies too heavily on retelling the original story rather than expanding on it like it was supposed to.The whole thing has a high school notebook doodle feeling to it. If you have any love for this movie don't break your childhood memories with this poor excuse for writing.

~Jen

Uzumaki Horror manga review

First off let's get one thing straight, Uzumaki has nothing to do with a certain blonde spikey
haired ninja, if You're looking for that you'll need to go elsewhere. If you're looking for one of the best horror themed graphic novels you can get your hands on, you'll be right at home.

Uzumaki isn't what most Americans would think of as your typical Japanese Horror manga. There aren't long haired shrine
maidens, no forbidden rituals, haunted video tapes, or vengeful ghosts, in fact pretty much no religion and no hauntings. What is does have though, is disturbing imagery, bizarre paranormal events and a complete descent into to madness.

Uzumaki translates into Spiral and tells the story of how an entire town becomes fixated, contaminated and possessed by the evil of the spiral. The concept seems completely silly at first, barring the hypnotism angle, spirals seem pretty benign. They are among the common and most primitive of human symbols Additionally, if you believe in Fibonacci's Spiral the entire world is possessed by spirals and most of us to seem to have gone crazy yet. But Junji Ito really pulls it off and while you may not be quaking in your bed after reading it, you should definitely be feeling some mental discomfort.

The story is told through the main character, Kirie. A pretty young girl who lives in the town with her parents and younger brother. One day she comes across her boyfriend's father staring at a snail shell on a wall, she attempts to talk to him, but he ignores her and she chalks it up to a case of mistaken identity. She tells her boyfriend, Shuichi about the incident who is sure that it was his father and that lately he has becomes completely obsessed with spirals and has been collecting them. Shuichi also confides in her that he feels that there's something wrong with the town, something that will drive them both crazy if they stay there. His father's obsession becomes worse and worse, until he decides he no longer needs the spiral collection, because he himself has the ability to become a spiral. This culminates in a particularity disturbing scene of his death. Stranger still, he is when cremated a column of black smoke spirals into the sky before spiraling down again into the dragonfly pond in the center of the city, and right next to Kirie's home. Shuichi's mother is driven mad after her husbands death and fears spirals. She becomes determined to rid body and environment of them, dying in the process. When she's cremated, the same smoke incident occurs and that's just the beginning.

Soon the towns people become stranger and stranger. More bizarre events and unexplained deaths begin happening and with every death and cremation the column of smoke spirals into the sky and down into the pond. Shuichi tries to convince Kirie that the town is contaminated and possessed by the spiral, things happen there that don't happen in other towns: swirling of the clouds, whirlwinds, whirlpools, and curled plants and begs her to leave with him before it's too late. Naturally Kirie believes he's just stressed after the deaths of his parents, but soon she founds out he was right and she and her family become contaminated by the spiral, but it's too late to leave.

The story gets progressively darker and more disturbing chapter by chapter as the true madness of the "spiral contamination" really starts to grip the town. As you follow the characters, it very easy to like them and really feel for their plight. Their circumstances are completely fantastic and not something we'd every really expect to see, but the character themselves react in ways that are human and normal. You believe that these people could really exist, they just happened to have been caught in a wave of bizarre and frightening circumstances. Which is exactly the sort of thing that scares us the most. That being said I do think a couple of chapters were missteps. Medusa in particular was just absurd as far as I'm concerned and really broke the mood. Having a hair battle isn't scary, it's funny. To be fair there's a bit of dark humor throughout, but a whole humorous chapter (if even that wasn't the intent) definitely breaks the suspense. I wasn't a big fan of the "mollusk people" either, it seemed to be going for something Like Kafka's Metamorphosis, but instead of conveying the sort of bleak misery and desperation of that story, the mollusk people just seem silly.

Graphically this manga looks older which might be a turn off to some readers. The character themselves remind me more of old shoujo characters than the sort of gritty style that I'd expect to see in horror. And there's it's not the same slick heavily shaded gore you'd find in something like Battle Royal. However, the imagery is fantastic, it's dark, detailed, disturbing and highly effective. The Mosquitoes, Jack in the Box and Black Lighthouse chapters in particular have some of the worst (the image is from black lighthouse). I won't post it here but there's an image in the mosquitoes chapter that gives a particularly warped and disturbing look at at childbirth and motherhood, probably one of the most disturbing images in the entire series and one that will stick with you long after you've closed it. The characters are extremely expressive, Ito does fantastic job of showing their wide range of emotions. Fear, disgust, horror, sadness, concern, determination and even love are all portrayed with accuracy and believability.

Uzumaki deserves it's place among horror classics, it's go great writing and fantastic imagery. Even if you're not interested in "traditional"J-horror, anybody with even a passive interest in the horror should read this. I've read a lot of horror comics and I can say this is one of the finest examples of the genre, from east or west.

~Stephanie

Don't forget to stop by our shop for manga collectibles:

Basara Manga and Anime Mini Review & Store Updates

We're doing bunches of store updates now in an effort to reclaim some of our long lost shelf/floor/closet space. We're starting with our manga collection though it's proving a bit difficult to part with too many, is there some sort of 12 step program for manga addicts? Actually book buyers in general I can never pass up a decently priced interesting looking book of any sort and now they're kind of eating the house. But, I'm getting pretty off topic here.

Anyway, the largest manga collection in our shop wasn't even something we had to decide to part with, it's doubles from buying a lot to complete our collection. *sigh* But, it's well worth reading and well worth featuring: 12 volumes of Basara in English.


If you haven't heard of Basara, I would liken it one of my personal favorite manga/anime, CLAMP's masterpiece, X. Beautiful, bloody and emotionally complex. At first there seems to be a clear wrong and right, but as you progress you can see that everything is bathed in grey, both sides have valid points and arguments and are fighting for what they truly believe in. There's much more of an emphasis an the romance aspects than you see in X, but even for someone like me who often feels romance ruins an otherwise great manga, it's well written and really helps develop the characters. Basara is shoujo fantasy epic that supposed to be set in a distant future post apocolyptic Japan but looks much more like a medieval inspired fantasy kingdom. It follows the story of a young girl named Sarasa. Sarasa's twin brother, Tatara, was predicted to be the "child of light" who would lead the people to revolution and freedom. However, the hated and feared tyrant of their land , the Red King, sees to the end of Tatara's prophecy. Before anyone realizes what happens to Tatara, Sarasa decided to take up the revolutionary fight, calls herself Tatara and vows to fufil the prophecy on her own without anyone knowing the truth. Sarasa is not your typical crying helpless herione who thinks about nothing more than shopping and her next date. She has the fate of her land and her people on her shoulders and doesn't even get a magic wand. It's a far cry from the magical girls and high school drama one usually associates with the Shoujo genre. Though like you would expect with a Shoujo, there is romance and most of the story is told in, feelings, emotions and chance encounters rather than epic battles.
The entire Manga series runs 27 volumes, but these 12 are good place to start. :)

There's an anime as well, titled as Legend of Basara, it runs 13 episodes and covers the first 5 manga. It's a pretty true telling compared with the manga and well worth tracking down, we watched the entire thing in one sitting, it was THAT complelling. Sadly, it hasn't been released outside of japan, but fasubs are pretty readily available (We've got it on fansubed VHS , we're old like that). My only complaints about the anime are :
1) The art is pretty inconsistent, a third of the time it's beautiful, a third of the time it's terrible, and the rest of the time it's pretty "meh".
And 2) It also end very early on and with a cliffhanger. So I highly suggest at least having some of the manga on hand if you plan to watch the anime first or you will find yourself wandering online bookstores when you finishit late at night hoping to find it ASAP. I speak from personal experience on this one. ;)

Lots of other manga are headed into the store in the next few days as well so look for large portions/complete sets from: Judas, oh/ah my goddess, a slew of sailor moon comics and lots of single volumes other great titles.
A few other fun things that aren't so manga shaped will probably make their way in too , like this cute mint on card Sailor Neptune Figure.


So go shopping! and don't forget to use may's coupon code: MayBlog for a nice discount!

~Stephanie